MODALITY EFFECTS IN THE SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION PROCESS FOR THE BRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

This work reflects about some processing features related to performance of Sign Language Interpreters and how they deal with the modality effects. For this, we used data from an empirical-experimental study which draws on the performance of two groups who interpreted an oral text from Portuguese to LSB: Group A - bilinguals natives in Sign Language - CODA and Group B - bilinguals non-natives in Sign Language. Video Recording, Retrospective Think-aloud Protocols and questionnaires were used as methodological tools for the data collection. For the data transcription process and annotations we used EUDICO Linguistic Annotator. Therefore, this work cross-examines and analyses how two Sign Language Interpreters employ enlargement and repetition of signs as strategies for monitoring of the delay from the time of reception of the utterances of source text to the beginning of utterance of target text production. The analysis carried out contributing to understand the importance of conscious monitoring of the sign language interpretation process. Then, we consider the specialty of interpretation from an oral language, Portuguese, to the visual-spatial language, LSB, and we notice that study about interpreter performance in the language pair LSB-Portuguese offers an area of analyses that refers to possible effects in which the difference in the modality have implication to the interpretation process. Finally, the analysis suggests that enlargement and repetition strategies support the lag time and/or the reflection for decision making when (i) inputs from the source text stop, (ii) utterance is not full and/or (iii) problems of interpretation arise.